Bush Orders Contractors to Vet Status of Workers

From The New York Times:

President Bush has ordered federal contractors to participate in the Department of Homeland Security’s electronic system for verifying the immigration status of their workers, greatly expanding the reach of the administration’s crackdown on employers who hire illegal immigrants.

An executive order, signed by the president on Friday and announced on Monday, requires federal contractors to use the system, known as E-Verify, to check immigration status when they hire new workers or start work under government contracts.
This is the first time that participation in the program, which Congress established in 1996 as a voluntary system, has become mandatory for any large group of employers.

As recently at 2005, the E-Verify system was a pilot program that gave employers a way to confirm that Social Security numbers and immigration information provided by new employees matched federal records. As the administration has stepped up immigration raids at work sites in the last two years, employers’ participation has grown sharply.

About 69,000 employers are now enrolled, up from about 5,900 in 2005, according to federal figures released on Monday. That is still a small fraction of the estimated 7.4 million employers in the United States. Officials estimated that as many as 200,000 contractors would be covered by the new rule.